


you made me the bad guy

by lonelyghosts



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Anger, Angst, Betrayal, Canon Compliant, Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, Gen, War, angry lucretia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-22 21:51:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17067791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelyghosts/pseuds/lonelyghosts
Summary: Lucretia writes the tragedy of Armos, its shining walls of peppermint glazed with blood and mint. The field where Greenhold used to be before the Oculus sucked it in. The drowned city of Moonshae.Something must be done, and Lucretia is the only one willing.





	you made me the bad guy

**Author's Note:**

> there's lots of guilty!lucretia in this fandom- and don't get me wrong, that's good content and i love guilty!lucretia- but there isn't nearly enough angry!lucretia, so. here it is
> 
> heavily inspired by [this animatic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ22FDfTMig), which i love with all my heart

She was never on board with the artifact plan. She made it clear from the start: this will only end in strife, and tragedy, and death. Lucretia was a literature major. She had the complete works of Tolkien on her dresser back home. Power corrupts, history had written, and Lucretia had seen it firsthand. The Light was so bright and beautiful and full of the heady rush of adrenaline-power, and Lucretia knew what that could do to someone. 

But they ruled against her, and so Lucretia grit her teeth and poured the Light into a staff of white oak and infused it with all the love that she puts into her shields- all the bonds, all the faith in her friends, all the fullness of her love and her stories and her self- and the seven of them scattered their creations across the world, and she watched.

Magnus said, "if it doesn't work, then next cycle, we can do your thing," and Lucretia held onto that with all she had. 

The resulting bloodbath was beyond even what she had predicted.

War. Murder. Atrocities the likes of which Lucretia was nauseous at; eighteen years old, her hair white from stress, watching from the sidelines of a battlefield that was her own craft, and knowing nothing but guilt.

After, they count the bodies. Lucretia stumbles upon a little girl-corpse in the mud and is struck, suddenly, by the memory of the little sister she once had, that was overtaken by a hungry plane wishing for the void. Her sister was so young, too, when she died. It has been a hundred years. Lucretia has tried not to think of her. 

She turns the body over when she kneels down. The girl's face is so young and peaceful that Lucretia could almost believe that she's just sleeping, but she's not, and she will never sleep or wake again. 

When she returns to the other six, her face is hard, the way it was when she was alone, surviving a year by herself with her nimble hands and patched up metal and repairs that must- that have to- work. She feels as alone now as she was then, and if the others notice it, they don't say anything.

* * *

What does not working mean, at this point? Lucretia is the archivist, the lonely journal keeper. She more than anyone understands the weight of what they've done. Lucretia writes down the tragedy of Armos, its shining walls of peppermint glazed with blood and mint. The field where Greenhold used to be before the Oculus sucked it in, and the howling silence of the absence of people, the gutted emptiness of its clearings. The drowned city of Moonshae, and its ruins, sunk deep, the bloated bodies of children, their faces twisted into dying rictuses, and old men, pipes still jutting from their lips, and young women in their prime who thought they could fight a storm and win, the swords rusting in their hands. 

They are murderers. They have exchanged one evil for another. They are a hunger of their own, consuming lives because it's the path of least resistance. Lucretia documents each and every one of the bloodbaths that they have created, and wonders when the others will say, Enough.

* * *

She tries to speak to them. She tries her best, she really does- Lucretia was a literature major, and she learned how best to pitch her ideas to others, she's good at this. But none of them will listen.

* * *

 

"Taako, this is wrong, what we're doing," she begs, standing at one of the kitchen counters as he flips pancakes. He won't make eye contact with her, and her grip on the granite countertops tightens. "We're killing people, this is wrong, we can't do this, we can't-"

"Jesus, Luce," he sighs, finally turning to look at her. "Yeah, it sucks. But we made a decision, and we can't go back on it now. You got overruled, homie. You gotta deal with it." 

She bites back the retort coming to her lips- that he's only going along with this because of his sister, that if the shield had been Lup's idea instead of Lucretia, then they'd have already cut this world off from the Hunger. But Lucretia knows that would be too cruel, so she says nothing, just lets out a breath before she leaves the room.

* * *

"Capn', we can't- this isn't- we have to- we can't let this go on, we can't keep going like this-"

They're standing in front of a grassy knoll where once sat a village of a thousand people. It is empty, now. This place is full of silence, and the strange awful absence of being; Lucretia can almost hear the spirits left behind, screaming. 

"I know, Lucretia," he says, and his voice is heavy with regret. "But there's nothing we can do now."

He turns and walks away from the site of the tragedy that was wrought with his tools, down the hill until he is only a figure in the distance. Lucretia swallows, and does not move.

* * *

"Do you ever wonder- if- if there's stuff happening out there that we can't stop, because we don't know that it's not supposed to be like this?" 

Magnus's eyes are big and wet and his voice cracks on the last word, and Lucretia knows he's thinking of the Temporal Chalice, the way it crooned to him as he made it, the way its effects were invisible to all but those who held it. 

"Yes," she says, and lays a hand on his shoulder. 

For a few minutes she stands there as Magnus buries his face in his hands, silent, before she says, "It doesn't have to be like this, Magnus-"

The sigh that rolls out of him hits her like a brick, so thick is the dismissive contempt in it. "We've been over this, Creesh," he says. "The decision's been made." 

He stands up and walks away, and Lucretia is left alone, shaking with anger and frustration and most of all the thick helplessness that is so familiar to her as of late.

* * *

Merle is harder. When she brings it up, after seeing the drowned ruins of Moonshae, the sympathy on him is so hard for her to stomach that she shakes, breaks, falls apart on his shoulder and sobs her fears and guilt out into him, and he holds her close, pats her back as she sniffles. 

"I know it's hard, Lucretia," he murmurs into her hair as he pats her back. "Let it all out. C'mon, let it go. Let it all go."

After she's done, he smiles at her and says, "it's okay to fall apart sometimes," and sits with her for a while, but when she brings up the idea of undoing what they'd done, he simply tells her that feeling guilty is normal, and finally she stops talking about it, because Merle doesn't seem to realize that she means this.

He leaves her sitting in her room, on her bunk, shaking. 

* * *

She's never gotten along well with Barry, compared to the others, but Lucretia knows how to deal with people who don't like her. She was a literature major, after all! A fair few of her professors hated everything that she wrote, and that didn't stop her from getting a 4.0 GPA. 

Lucretia gets one sentence in, a simple, "Barry, these artifacts are killing people," before he cuts her off.

"Lucretia, enough is enough," he snaps. "This is the only way. Stop pestering us about it." 

There's nothing she can do. She leaves him to his work.

* * *

It is Lup, of all people, who listens.

They are curled up in bed together, twined around one another, each of them safe in the other's arms, when Lucretia says, "Lup, we're killing people."

It is far from ideal pillow talk, but Lup listens.

"I know, Lu," she says, and smooths back a curl of Lucretia's hair from her forehead. "You're right. We're killing people. And I didn't think- when we made these artifacts, I didn't think it would be like this," Lup confesses, biting her lip. 

"We can't go on like this, watching the world tear itself apart," Lucretia whispers. "Tearing ourselves apart because we don't think that there's anything else we can do. Gods, Lup, I'm-"

She buries her face in the crook of Lup's neck, and Lup pets her hair as Lucretia cries, because she's eighteen and there's so much blood on her hands and she is killing people every day, and what would her dead mother think?

"We'll fix it, okay?" Lup tells her, and her voice is strong in its softness. "We'll fix it."

* * *

Two months later and there is a note on the table saying  _Back soon_ and Lup is gone and Lucretia didn't want it to be like this.

She writes letters to Lup in her journals, says,  _I know we said we'd fix this but I didn't want it to be like this. We were supposed to do this together, okay? We were supposed to be a team. You left me behind and they won't listen to me. None of them listen to me while they remember you._

It is while writing these letters that Lucretia comes up with a plan. 

* * *

On the sixty-fifth cycle of their journey, Lucretia lost all six of her friends in a single day and was left alone, with a broken ship and her writing-callused hands and nothing else. And none of the others understood what that meant, the loneliness- the sleepless nights of diagrams and missing parts, the burnt and bleeding fingers as she patched and welded metal together, the broken diary entries of sobbing and smudged ink and  _I wish they were here I wish they were here they'd know what to do I'm just a wordkeeper I wasn't made for this._

Lucretia knows loneliness. Lucretia knows hard decisions. I can do this, she tells herself, the journals clutched to her chest, Fisher burbling behind her. I am alone, the way I was then. I can survive this. I can make this right.

The journals fall, page by page, into the water, and Lucretia steels her heart. A few decades ago, they promised that they would never sacrifice a world just to thwart the Hunger's plans. That's a promise that she intends to keep.

* * *

Years later, Taako is wet-eyed and snarling in front of her, the Umbrastaff pointed in her face, and he's counting down to her doom.

Lucretia understands, she really does. What she's done has been unforgiveable- she knows what not having Lup did to Taako. She has lived for years looking Davenport in the face and seeing exactly what an awful person she is. She is well aware of how fucked up her actions are.

But she also remembers trying her best to talk to them, to ask for help. She remembers seeing the destruction of cities at a time, she remembers pleading with her family and getting silence. This was her family, and none of them would help her.

Lucretia looks Taako in the eye and asks him, "What was I supposed to do?"

 

**Author's Note:**

> lucretia's actions were obviously not... good. but i think she was taking the only course of action that she had available to her. like, if she hadn't done anything people would have kept dying by the hundreds, and no one was willing to help her- no one was willing to actually say, hey we need to reconsider what we're doing here, and none of them LET her try and fix it. so she had to do it herself. obviously what she did was still bad but it was the only thing she could do.
> 
> and in the end what she did? was part of what saved the world. without what she did, they never wouldve remade the light of creation and saved the world. so here in this house i stan lucretia !


End file.
